Prophetie epistle

by Edward Gilbreath

artin Luther King Jr. lived less

than four decades, and his publie life spanned only 13 years,
ending in 1968. In that time, the Baptist
minister turned civil rights activist
pricked the conscience of an America
that was just a hundred years removed
from Civil War and still wrestling to
make real its creed that all men are ereated equal. One of Kings most piercing
proclamations of his faith-tinged message of nonviolent resistance was Letter
from Birmingham Jail, a letter written
in the tradition of the apostle Pauls
prison epistles. Barnard College sociologist and historian Jonathan Rieder surveys the events that gave rise to Kings
message and offers a fresh perspective
on the substance of the letter itself,
which provided nothing less than the
moral and philosophical foundations of
the civil rights movement.
The year 1963 was a crucial one for
King. Many recall the August 1963
March on Washington, which begat
Kings legendary I Have a Dream
speech, as the defining moment of the
civil rights movement. But the setting for
the years most crucial action was not
Washington, D.C., but Birmingham,
Alabama.
Birmingham was a place described by
King as the most thoroughly segregated
city in the United States. It was a city
where not only were libraries segregated, but books containing images of black
rabbits and white rabbits on the same
page were banned from the shelves. It
was a city where, according to a famous
report by New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury, every medium
of mutual interest, every reasoned
approach, every inch of middle ground
has been fragmented by the emotional

Christian Century April 17, 2013

dynamite of racism. It was a city where

bullets, bombs and burning crosses
served as constant deterrents to African
Americans who aspired to anything
greater than their assigned station.
There, during the spring of 1963, King
and his associates in the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference staged
a nonviolent campaign that transformed
America.
The campaign, which was aimed at
desegregating the citys businesses and
public facilities, started with a whimper
but would find its legs weeks later when
elementary and high-school students
were recruited to participate in the
demonstrations. It is the iconic images
of those children and teens marching
against the brutal assaults of Birmingham public safety commissioner
Eugene Bull Connors fire hoses and
police dogs that stunned the nation
and led to the eventual dismantling of
the Deep Souths elaborate system
of apartheid.
Rieder weaves this history in and out
of his narrative, reminding us at every
turn just how fragile and human the
desegration effort was from the outset.
On April 12,1963Good FridayKing
was arrested for demonstrating on the
streets of Birmingham. He spent eight
days in solitary confinement. Meanwhile,
the movement threatened to implode
from the weight of internal and external
forcesan initially unfocused strategy,
infighting among the leadership, a Kennedy administration beholden to the
votes of segregationist Democrats, and
conservative black businessmen uneasy
about the public protests.
King was slipped a copy of the local
newspaper in which he spotted a Call to
Unity from a group of prominent,
36

Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther

King, 3r.'s Letter from Birmingham
3ail and the Struggle That
Changed a Nation
By Jonathan Rieder
Bloomsbury Press, 240 pp., $25.00

socially moderate Birmingham ministers.

The groupcomposed of six Protestant
ministers, a Catholic bishop and a Jewish
rabbiwas supportive of civil rights for
Negroes but critical of Kings extreme
protest methods, which the clergymen
felt would lead to civil unrest and unnecessary violence. They referred to King as
an outsider and criticized the movement for unwise and untimely demonstrations.
This attack both hurt and infuriated
King. Scrawling feverishly in the margins
of the newspaper and on any other paper
scraps he could obtain, King fired off an
almost stream-of-consciousness rebuttal
of the clergymens statement. His scribblings were gradually smuggled out of
the jail by an aide and later edited into a
cohesive whole under the supervision of
Kings SCLC colleague Wyatt Tee
Walker.
Gospel o f Freedom takes its title and
momentum from Kings words in the letters introduction defending his presence
in Birmingham: Just as the prophets of
the eighth century B.C. left their villages
and carried their thus saith the Lord far
beyond the boundaries of their home
towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left
Edward Gilbreath is the author o f Reconciliation
Blues: A Black Evangelicals Inside View of
White Christianity and Remembering Birmingham: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter
to Am erica50 Years Later.

his village of Tarsus and carried the

gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners
of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom far
beyond my own hometown. Like Paul, I
must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Rieder traces the letters rhetorical
flow from Kings initial attempt to win
over his critics through appeals to their
reason, sympathy, and conscience to its
sudden midpoint shift to a more blunt
and indignant tone. King drops the
mask, says Rieder. Instead of explaining himself, he chides and criticizes. He
shows himself to be not just a black man
but an angry black man. The diplomat
gives way to the prophet.
In a post-civil rights era that over
time has steadily tamed and sanitized
Kings radical opposition to social injustice, Rieder boldly hoists before us a
more nearly complete Martin Luther
King Jr. whose profound appeals to nonviolence were balanced by equally
aggressive calls to resist the spiritual corruption and institutionalized racism of
American society and, when necessary,
its resultant laws. The authors previous
book on King, The Word o f the Lord Is
Upon Me, provided a similarly insightful
contribution to MLK scholarship, offering an unvarnished meditation on Kings
several voiceshis black Baptist voice,
his community organizer voice and his
white crossover voice. That book
revealed King the bawdy jokester, King
the angry prophetand above all King
the devout black churchman. Gospel o f
Freedom revives and deepens that
approach, examining Letter from
Birmingham Jail as both Kings formal
public response to white moderate critics
as well as an intimate, transcribed form
of oral culture for his black allies.
Rieder examines the letters importance on political, spiritual and literary
grounds, but he also recognizes the documents origins as a device for propaganda. Indeed, the idea of creating a
prison epistle as a kind of press release
for the movement had been floated during one of Kings earlier jail stints but
was nixed. While this speaks to the fact
that there always had been a PR motive
in mind, Rieders analysis leaves no
question that he views the actual writing

of the Birmingham letter as Kings

impassioned, real-time reaction to the
eight clergymens public censure of his
message.
Though Letter from Birmingham
Jail did not play a role in resolving the
immediate conflict in Birmingham, it
would spread beyond the events that
spawned it and earn comparisons to
Lincolns Gettysburg Address and mile
Zolas J Accuse. Weeks after the
Birmingham campaign, condensed versions of Kings missive found their way
to the public in publications such as the
New York Post and Reinhold Niebuhrs
Christianity and Crisis journal. But it was
not until the June 12, 1963, issue of the
C h r i s t i a n C e n t u r y that the complete
letter was printedalong with an invitation for readers to send checks to support the work of the SCLC. Perhaps
sensing the historic nature of their gesture, the editors wrote: Believing that
the document expresses, better than any
other we have seen, the quality of mind
and spirit which informs the most important movement for integration in the
south, we . . . publish it as a contribution
to justice in race relations and in the
faith that it will help heal a most grievous
wound which this nation is inflicting
upon herself.
In an allegedly postracial America,
we have yet to fully heal those selfinflicted wounds. The election of a black
president and a keener awareness of the
systemic injustices facing people of color
have not necessarily addressed the spiritual component of our dysfunction. But,
as Rieder makes clear, the King who
wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail
was under no illusion that America was
a providential nation whose destiny
was freedom. He knew that it would
require a dogged, ongoing commitment
to the gospel of freedom in order for all
Gods children to be at peace with one
another.

:*

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